Dallas, Texas 03/06/2014 (FINANCIALSTRENDS) – Micron Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:MU) disclosed after close of business yesterday that it has signed off an agreement with the justice department as a result of which the chip maker will pay a penalty of $66.7 million in lieu of settlement of antitrust case against it.
The deal with Micron Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:MU) was made public by Attorney General Lawrence Wasden who led the prosecution case against the Idoho based chipmaker. 34 other states of U.S were party to the anti trust law suite which the tech firm was defending along with eleven other chip makers who were into the manufacture of DRAMS.
The total penalty being paid in aggregate by all the 12 tech firms together goes up to $311 million. Korean tech giant Samsung got hit with the biggest fine in this case. It has agreed to pay $113 million as fine, with Micron being the second biggest penalty payer. As the tech giants have agreed to shell out proceeds as penalty, the impacted consumers on behalf of whom the state machinery had gone after the tech firms can start to press their claims in front of the appropriate authority and can expect to be paid part of the fine as compensation, in the event of the courts approving their claim.
The judge in the anti trust case ruled that the chip makers and device manufactures had colluded with each other by forming a cartel and had artificially inflated the price of the DRAMS which are used for memory storage in devices like cameras, cellphones and iPods, tablets and computers.
When the news became public yesterday, the stock of Micron Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:MU) experienced heavy selling leading to a mass exodus of investors from the stock. When markets closed for the day, the stock had gone down by 1.12 percent.
